"The left-hand circle, or discometer, was divided by nineteen hundred and twenty concentric circles, equidistant from each other. The outermost, about twice as far from the center as from the external edge of the mirror, was exactly equal to the sun's circumference when presenting the largest disc he ever shows to an observer on Earth. Each inner circle corresponded to a diameter reduced by one second. By means of a vernier or eye-piece, the diameter of the Sun could be read off the discometer, and from his diameter my distance could be accurately calculated."91
A year later, Greg's book was followed by another, equally strange novel, written by William Delisle Hay (?), titled Three Hundred Years Hence or a Voice From Posterity, that like Greg's novel, was published in London. Several of its themes also show a similarity to Greg's Across the Zodiac, and to Keely's concepts. But little is known of Hay other than that he once lived in New Zealand, and wrote two scholarly treatises on British fungi,92 and again, the personal details yield no clues as to any direct connection. Of Hay's book, opinions differ widely. The story may be looked upon as a "... solid prediction of the future, firmly based on the advance of technology..." making ' 'more changes to the state of the human race than practically any other work of the 19th century... "93 and as "... seriously intended prediction,"94 but also as a "ruthless Spencerian survival of the fittest."95 This is not so strange, since the elements that are of interest here are imbedded in a story of terrible wars, overpopulation and its gruesome solution: a One World Order and the extermination of whole races.96
A minor element in the story that serves as a roadmark towards the influence of Keely is Hay's description of a small, compact, easy and cheap-to-build device that requires no fuel. Called the "mechanical friction machine," it replaces coal for all domestic and industrial purposes.97
A major element of influence is Hay's description of the discovery of a new force called ballisticity, or the Basilic Force, that links vitality and matter, permitting direct mental and organic control of light, heat, motion, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity and attraction. While Hay's novel features huge submarines and diving suits, earth tubes and subterranean earth-borers, the tapping of the geothermal heat and the warming up of the poles and the founding of enormous subterranean cities,98 his descriptions of numerous types of airships and flying machines are its most interesting detail.
These airships are propelled by four distinctly different systems of motive power. One of these systems employs lucegen, an astonishingly lighter-than-air gas that alters its volume, and thus its buoyancy, by a factor of 10 when an electric current is passed through it. Canopies of balloons contain this extremely light gas; the canopy is positioned below instead of above the carriage: "The car was thus immersed, as it were, in a bladder covering it externally but leaving it open above; it sat in its balloonjust as it might in water."
Hay foresaw that such a design might be unstable, so in order to prevent such a balloon from toppling over, powerful magnets are used that are attracted to the Earth's magnetic field. Stabilized, the "Lucegenostats" are able to carry large weights of freight or passengers. Yet these Lucegenostats are surpassed by even more powerful aerial machines, working on the three other systems. Their lift is being provided by basilicomagnetism for greater power and safety. The propellant comes from "generated heat and electricity," which causes a pair of fans, modeled on wings of birds, "extended along the sides of the craft from stern to stern" to flap. This type is known as the "alamotor," and is used for small, utilitarian crafts such as those used for agricultural purposes. The "spiralometer" is driven by one or more propellers of the "pusher" variety, normally placed at the stern. "Heat and electricity give the motive power, and this form is the most generally employed on aircraft," Hay writes.
The other airships, able to lift any weight, use a new and "utterly unsuspected force," which Hay names zodiacal force, clearly meant as a hint to Greg's Across the Zodiac. Hay describes the zodiacal force as "that which holds together the elements of the air." Driven by Zodiamotors, being powered by Zodiacal electricity, the airships travel a thousand miles an hour or faster, "though seldom employing more than half that rate."99
In 1882, a year after Hay's futuristic visions and just a short distance from Philadelphia, a most remarkable book was privately printed. The title of the book was Oahspe, and it would in many respects prove as puzzling as the Philadelphian inventor. The history of its conception was as outre as its contents. Oahspe was "automatically" written in the course of one year by John Ballou Newbrough (1828-1891). He was not a lonely literator who was starving in a garret, instead he was no stranger to the occult communities of the time. Newbrough had traveled widely in Europe and the Orient, lecturing to spiritualist groups while "wearing brightly colored Oriental robes."100 His fame as a medium and automatic writer spread and, consequently, legends sprang up around him. He was said to be able to paint pictures in total darkness, using both hands in the process. It was said that he could close his eyes and read any book in any library. As with Keely, many claimed that Newbrough possessed some means to overcome gravity; he could easily lift weights of more than a ton. It was also claimed that his astral body was able to visit any place on earth.101
Newbrough was active as a medium for two years in The Domain, a small spiritualist colony in Jamestown, New York. He also acquired the ability to write automatically in long-hand. All this occult activity would have its repercussions on him. One night in 1870, he was visited by what he described as wingless angels, bathing in a soft light. A voice told him that he was destined for a special mission. Ten years later he was again awakened by the mysterious light, and the voice commanded him to buy a typewriter. Angels, the voice assured him, would guide his fingers while he typed. These automatic typewriting sessions began in the early morning of January 1, 1881, and would last until December 15 of the same year.102
After fifty weeks, in which Newbroughs' angels controlled his fingers for half an hour before sunrise, the controls finally stopped. He was told by the angels to read for the first time what he had written, and then to publish it as a book, entitled Oahspe. Newbrough printed the book himself in Boston in 1882 on a press bought with money from seven anonymous associates. No author's name was on the title page. A second, revised edition appeared in 1891, which was reprinted in London in 1910.103
Oahspe features an elaborate and complex cosmogony, with thousands of millions of gods, huge spiritual realms and higher dimensions. In this vast hierarchy, there are also countless numbers of heavens, one of these called Etherea. All heavenly bodies, suns, planets, and moons arise from and are sustained by rotating vortices of space-time, so reminiscent of what Keely termed "the celestial forces."
Mutual influence or similarity between the two we will probably never know. Perhaps Oahspe was handed over by that other medium and Keely's friend, Colville. Newbrough's manuscript of Oahspe was destroyed in a flood, and his social life during the years that he visited spiritualist circles and traveled widely before he wrote Oahspe was never the subject of any in-depth study. What is interesting in connection to the intellectual framework in which Keely lived, conducted his antigravity experiments and formulated his theories concerning gravity, is that a similar train of thought can be discerned in Oahspe: "Things fall not to the earth because of the magnetism therein.. .but they are driven toward the center of the vortex, by the power of the vortex."104 And what Keely called the "sympathetic attractive, or the force that draws the planets together" and in another application would regulate the motions of the planets "in their recession
from each other" is named by Newbrough "the force of the vortex" or "vortexya."
But Keely also admits that "All such experiments that I have made.. .resulted in vortex motion invariably, both sympathetically and otherwise. Vortex motion follows nature in all corpuscular action."105
Newbrough also mentions ether, but calls it "ethe": "There are two known things in the universe: ethe and corpor."106 Oahspe further adds that "Att
raction... existeth not in any corporeal substance as a separate thing. There is no substance of attraction. Nor is there any substance of gravitation. These powers are the manifestation of vortexya."107 And Newbrough, or his angelic guides, warns sternly that to withdraw the vortexian power would be catastrophic; "the earth would instantly go into dissolution."108 Keely gravely states that, "It is the sympathetic attractive force which keeps the planets subservient to a certain range of motion, between their oscillations. If this condition were broken up, the rotation of the planets would cease; if destroyed at a given point of recession, all planets would become wanderers, like the comets; if destroyed at another given point, assimilation would take place... meeting, would fuse into one mass."109
Newbrough's universe in Oahspe is not a cold and lonely place, forever stretching itself blindly and meaninglessly out into the void; angels in nonmaterial Etherean ships inhabit the universe. One ship is almost as large as the earth. Some are propelled by vibrations of colors, others by musical vibrations,110 a concept that is also familiar in Keely's thoughts on aerial navigation.
But in this framework, this stratum of spiritualists wanting to escape the horror vacui of a void universe, of occultists, theosophists, early theoreticists of antigravity and writers of imaginative fiction, we find another minor connection between Newbrough and Keely. Beside the similarities in thought — although each expressed these in a unique, personal jargon — the geographic surroundings that Keely and Newbrough shared, and the obvious rubbing of shoulders that at one time or another could have occurred, the link is found in a spiritualistic magazine. This magazine was Banner of Light, one of the leading spiritualist publications of that time. Newbrough himself published the account of how he came to write Oahspe in a long letter in Banner of Light dated January 21, 1883.111
Keely's friend William Colville who was a prolific writer and like Newbrough a spiritualist, also submitted his writings to this magazine. And like Colville, Newbrough was a lifelong freemason. When Newbrough died in 1891 of pneumonia, his associate was in Boston, overseeing the second printing of Oahspe. Newbrough died before the book left the press. His body was interred in a Masonic cemetery in Las Cruces.112
In 1890, a year before Newbrough died, Robert Cromie's fictional A Plunge into Space was published. The second edition featured a foreword by Jules Verne, the only foreword that Verne ever wrote. In the book, Henry Barnett discovered how to control the ethereal force after 20 years of experimenting, "which permeates all material things, all immaterial space"113 and that combines electricity and gravity: "...I have discovered the origin and essence of that law which, before me, never man did ought but name, or, at best, did but chronicle its known effects — the law which makes that universe of worlds a grand well-ordered army instead of a helpless mob of mutually destroying forces; when I tell you that within this ragged room, there stands a man who — grant him but ten years of human life — could sway a star in its course, could hurl a planet from its path? Man, I have discovered the mightiest secret of creation. ...I have discovered the origin-of-force!"114
The influence of Greg's Across the Zodiac on Cromie's novel has been noted.115 But Cromie (1856-1907), a Northern Irish writer and journalist, possibly through his profession, also read about Keely's weights-in-jars experiments, which received widespread press coverage the same year that the book was published, and passages in The Secret Doctrine that was published two years before Cromie's novel, in which she mentions Keely's disintegration experiments. These accounts impressed Cromie to a considerable extent, and as a consequence we find his borrowing of these actual experiments in his fictional novel. Take, for instance, the scene in which an unfortunate native meets a horrible end: "The Indian took the metal bar. ...His hand closed on the bar and instantaneously his frame drew up rigid. For a second or two he stood stiff and deathlike, and no man spoke. Then before the eyes of the horror-stricken crowd, the man's body sank down into a shapeless mass of pulp." Apparently one of Barnett's devices "almost wholly destroyed the attraction of cohesion in the man's body."116
Cromie's description of an antigravity experiment also bears an uncanny resemblance to Keely's weights-in-jars demonstrations: "The ball, a tiny sphere, was lying in a tube of glass. This tube stood in an upright position on a plate of that strange gray material. ...Barnett laid the end of a thin wire on the gray substance. The ball within the tube flew to its upper end and remained there, suspended, as it were, by a magnet. ...The experiments with the glass tube show that the law of gravitation may be diverted, directed, or destroyed."117
In this, Barnett succeeds and a large, black and globular spaceship called the "Steel Globe" is secretly built in an inaccessible region in Alaska. "A spiral staircase wound round the interior circumference of the globe. This staircase, or rather sloping path, had one very curious feature. The handrail was duplicated, so that if by any superhuman means the enormous bulk could be turned upside down one could walk on the underside of the spiral... Across the center of the Steel Globe a commodious platform swung like a ship's lamp. On this a very large telescope was fixed... the platform was literally packed with astronomical instruments. Strange registers, the graduated lines on which were so fine as to be almost invisible without the aid of a magnifying glass, were set into the woodwork of a solid table in the middle of the swinging deck. Strongly made iron tanks filled a considerable portion of the interior space.... These tanks contained compressed air. ... Innumerable windows pierced the whole circumference of the globe."118
With the Steel Globe, Barnett and his friends travel to Mars where they find Utopia. The Martians travel around in luxurious airships, but also have other means of negating gravity at their disposal: The Martians "were instructed... in that strange exercise of what may be called — in default of a better name — animal electricism. This discovery enabled the Martians to regulate at will the attraction of gravity upon them so that they could move at any distance they wished from the ground."119 Their discovery of a superior civilization prompts one of his friends to propose the erection of an "InterPlanetary Communication Company Limited."120
Of the direct influence of Keely on Bloomfield-Moore's acquaintance, writer, inventor, and wealthy stealthy John Jacob Astor it is not necessary to make educated guesses, to circumvent any social terrain, or to fathom any possible connections through obscure philosophies or esoteric pamphlets, for there is ample documentation that the two had met.
In 1894, in the year that Colville choose to publish Keely's intriguing accounts and rudimentary blueprints for a spaceship, Astor published his remarkable book A Journey In Other Worlds, after spending over two years writing it. Of this even the biographer of the Astor clan, while missing the connection to Keely, seemed impressed: "In 1894 he published a Jules Verne-type science fiction novel... in which he predicted future developments such as aeroplanes, television and space travel."121 Astor's novel with descriptions of an antigravity device working on apergy, a term that he had borrowed from Greg's book, was widely read and became a bestseller.122 Notwithstanding the success of his novel, Astor would never return to that specific literary genre.
In Greg's novel, Martian astronomers think of Jupiter as "not by any means so much less dense than the minor planets as his proportionally lesser weight would imply. They hold that his visible surface is that of an enormously deep atmosphere, within which lies, they suppose, a central ball, not merely hot but more than white hot, and probably, from its temperature, not yet possessing a solid crust." Perhaps a Martian writer thinks Jupiter's satellites hold life "since the satellites of Jupiter more resemble worlds than the planet itself, which may be regarded as a kind of secondary sun."123
And while one of Cromie's protagonists wonders what the planet Jupiter is like,124 the reader finds the answer to that question in Astor's very peculiar novel, for there, not Mars - already subject of so many visits - but Jupiter is the ultimate aim. A Journey In Other Worlds has a striking opening: "Jupiter — the magnificent planet with a diam
eter of 86,500 miles, having 119 times the surface and 1,300 times the volume of the earth — lay beneath them." While the traveling to the other planets in our solar system is an unusual and unique feature of Astor's novel, the positions of the axes of the planets of our solar system clearly obsessed him, and the straightening of the axis of the earth is its most important theme. A company called "The Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company" is concerned with the straightening of the axis of the Earth. This is done in order "to combine the extreme heat of the summer with the intense cold of the winter and produce a uniform temperature for each degree of latitude the year round."125
The newly discovered force of apergy is interestingly but only vaguely described as "a fluid," which brings Keely's vaporic substance into mind. Apergy is obtained "by simply blending negative and positive electricity with electricity of the third element or state." Antigravity is obtained by "charging a body sufficiently with this fluid, gravitation is mollified or partly reversed, and the earth repels the body with the same or greater power than that which it still attracts or attracted it, so that it may be suspended or caused to move away into space."116
Astor states that the secret of apergy was already known by certain persons; while Greg simply states that these persons were "those who possessed the secret of apergy." Astor equally vague calls them "the ancients." Perhaps Astor referred to the same "ancients" about whom John Keely once said that, "The ancients were far better schooled in spiritual philosophy than are we of the present age. Their mythological records, in their symbolic meaning, prove this fact. They recognized this latent element as the very breath of the Almighty; the sympathetic outflow of the trinity of force, the triple spiritual essence of God himself. Their concepts of Deity were greater and truer than our own. From them we learn that when God said 'let there be light,' He liberated the latent celestial element that illuminates the world: that when He breathed into man the breath of life, He impregnated him with that latent soul-element that made him a living and moving being."127
Free Energy Pioneer- John Worrell Keely Page 29
